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We all want to build up our email lists and get more subscribers.
And the common way to go about that is to offer an “ethical bribe”, or “free giveaway”. And, in almost all cases, this ends up being an ebook.
In some niches, an ebook is still a rather novel idea. However, in a growing portion of the Internet, free ebook giveaways are getting so common that the effectiveness of the offer has dropped a lot.
How would you like to learn how to use simple little Wordpress to literally deposit hundreds of dollars a day into your Clickbank account?
Did that sound…. spammy?
Probably.
But, give me a minute. Because, what I have to tell you is indeed the real deal.
So, I wanted a whiteboard. A big one to go into my new office. But, I didn’t want to get a second mortgage to afford it. I arrived at a solution. For less than 10% of the cost of a comparably sized whiteboard pre-built, I got the job done.
I get asked this question fairly often.
Usually it is from somebody evaluating one of my products to buy. Sometimes it is from somebody who is seeking a solution and just looking for whatever is going to work for them.
Often, the question is something like this…
So, I got an email from a reader. This person will remain unnamed, but it spawned this blog post.
While I’m removing some of the text, this section is left unmodified. I’m going to BOLD the parts I want to focus on.
Most of us spend quite a bit of time in our office. Have you set it up to make it a space you actually want to be in?
I mean, look at it this way…
I like to have a nice bed because we spend around a third of our lives in it. If the average person is sleeping 7-8 hours per night, that’s a third of every day.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I spend about that much time in my home office every day, too. Not only that, this is where I MAKE MY MONEY. So, it is a pretty important space. And I imagine the situation is similar with YOUR office.
Why is it that you can give the best information in the world on your site, and yet barely hear a peep from your readers?
No comments, no retweets, no shares. Its like being in the woods in the dark of night – crickets.
Yet… somebody’s shitty blog with hardly any real useful content seems to get all the activity.
Are they just lucky? What’s the missing X-factor?
I nervously plunged into the water in one of my first open water SCUBA drives on a shipwreck. Here’s how that helped me grow my business.
Have you ever sat down and really figured out WHY you want to see your blog or business take off?
What’s your mission?
Let me tell you a story…
A guy wants to open up a store. He is tired of his regular job and wants to do something different.
He reads a lot about stores. And then jumps right into setting up a store. He puts the shelves in there. He buys one of those big glowing “OPEN” signs. He makes everything all pretty. He looks forward to those hoardes of people who will, of course, come by to check out his pretty store.
Let’s say he even gets people to come in. He has the place all decked out. And he’s happy that he’s getting a little bit of foot traffic each day.
Then, one day, he sits down. And he asks…. “HOW AM I GOING TO MONETIZE THIS STORE?”
W.T.F?!
The subject of getting traffic to a website is a BIG topic. It has a lot of moving parts and some things work better for some than for others. There is no single effective method to build traffic. If there were, everybody would be doing it.
It is true, however, that some things tend to be more effective than others. My personal experience in this business has shown this. And I’ve seen new bloggers over-emphasize certain things and they end up wasting time.
So, I’ve devised a chart to rank certain popular traffic generation methods in terms of effectiveness, scaled from 0 to 10. 0 means it is mostly a waste of time, and 10 means it works insanely well.
So, webinars are awesome for a variety of reasons. They work well in terms of making sales of a product, too.
But, what product? Do you have to have gone through a bunch of work to create your own product in order to have a reason to do a webinar?
Nope.
Have you ever considered doing a webinar of your own? Or do you think this is something only the “big guys” do?
As you guys may have noticed, I have been doing more webinars lately. I intend to do more, of course. I have some plans coming up in that regard which I’ll tell you guys about soon. 🙂
But, there are good reasons why I’m doing webinars. Here are 6 of them…
I got a question the other day from one of my email subscribers. Chris Huff, from Behind The Mixer, asked:
What’s the best length for standard stuff after a blog post. For example, there can be a list of related articles, an about box, social media icons, newsletter subscription, quite a bit before the viewer ever sees the comment box. I’ve wanted to add a newsletter subscription box to mine, but as you can see on this page, it seems like the end of the article is getting pretty busy.
Really good question. 🙂
If you’re a blogger who is uncomfortable selling from your blog, here’s a technique that is super-simple and can make you more money.
This might work. I’m just sayin’. 🙂
First, look at average conversion rates. The average conversion rate on a sales letter is 1%-2%. Certainly nothing spectacular. Yet, on a typical squeeze page, the conversion rate might be more like 40% (or higher). I’ve had them convert at close to 60% before.
You make an offer. You pack a lot into it. And… it flops. It just doesn’t seem to connect and nobody gives a crap.
What happened?
Well, the reasons could be many. Wrong target market, wrong positioning, not really addressing the real needs and wants of your audience.
But, today, I want to bring to your attention a simple concept called Maslow’s hierachy of needs. Here it is, in all of its triangular glory…
Google Adsense. Probably the de facto way to make money with a blog – at least to newbies.
If you’ve read my Six Figure Blogger Blueprint, you know what I think of banner ads. They’re not the best way to make money with a blog. After all, the only way you get paid is to send traffic AWAY from your blog. And you’re only getting paid a few cents to do it.
I was having a discussion with somebody the other day. This person wanted to make money online. It didn’t really matter how, they just wanted money.
The plan (as they put it) was to find one of the most successful people online… and simply copy them. And, the understanding of the “how” was to start a blog and promote stuff.
This is part 4 of 4 of a series on Membership Sites & Recurring Income.
It is one thing to enroll a new member into your membership site. It is quite another to KEEP them.
The industry average retention period for a membership site is 3 months. That isn’t very long, and with a high turnover rate like that, the pressure will really be on to keep enrolling new people in order to grow your cash flow. There are, however, many things you can do to increase retention and keep people around.
This is part 3 of 4 of a series on Membership Sites & Recurring Income.
OK, step 1 is to build your membership site. Step 2 is to populate it with some content. Step 3 is…. (drum roll)….
Selling it.
The question is – how?
This is part 2 of 4 of a series on Membership Sites & Recurring Income.
Pretty much anything you might think of releasing as a standalone product could very easily be released into a membership site. In fact, any form of content could go in there. Blog posts, videos, ebooks, etc.
I think a lot of people (especially beginners) tend to think about the ebook when it comes to product offerings. The problem with ebooks is that the perceived value has dropped since so many people now do it. Depending on your niche, there are a lot of ebooks being given away as opt-in bribes. This makes the power of a PAID ebook diminished. Many people’s hard drives are littered with PDFs they haven’t yet read.
This is part 1 of 4 of a series on Membership Sites & Recurring Income.
There are many different ways to build a membership site these days. Quite frankly, it can be pretty overwhelming.
I’ve tried a lot of different options, so I’m going to share with you what I believe is the easiest and best combination of tools to build your membership site.
You know you should write about something. You haven’t posted to your blog in days. You’re not too proud of that fact. But, what do you write about?
So, you rack your brain. You come up with a few ideas, but perhaps you stall because you’ve kinda written about it before, or you’re not sure anybody but you will even care.
You might look at other bloggers and wonder, “How the hell do they keep getting all those great ideas for posts?”
Well, I don’t know. But, I’ll tell you how I go about it…
When you are brainstorming things that you can create and sell, it is useful to know the primary things that people are willing to pay money for.
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